james said:

I agree that using them for things that are not actually quotes could qualify as tag abuse, it is one of the tags that the Kindle understands

but that's not a matter we are deciding right now... down the line, we'll do customizing, for the kindle, and kf8, and ibooks, and nook, and .pdf, and so on, but for now, we're just nailing down the basic .html. don't get ahead of yourself. we'll arrive there soon.

I suppose some of these places where I'm using blockquotes could be replaced with bulleted lists.

hold on. i never said a "bulleted" list. if you check, you'll see i actually specified that no bullet be used. so the average person won't even know -- or care -- that those chunks are technically tagged as "a list"... and now i realize that i probably didn't remind you that the latest version of the .zml file is stored here:

http://zenmagiclove.com/bhaga/bhaga.zml

i'm pretty good about updating it when i point you to a new version, so you can store that info-nugget. anyway, on page 11, for instance, you will see that the .zml file has an " o " at the start of every item, and the converter turned it into an unbulleted list. that's true of all of the lists that i tagged in this file.

So if I put asterisks at the beginning of each line in these lists you could make them a bulleted list?

i already did it. but it's " o ", and it's _unbulleted_... (i haven't made a firm rule about the exact .zml tag for an unbulleted list, but for your file, it'll be " o ".)

I don't think there is any poetry in this book

so we won't even think about that. be in the moment. *** and then later... james said:

Forget what I said about bulleted lists.

i decided to turn it into a teaching opportunity instead.

These lists are pretty clearly just indented paragraphs.

i'm not clear exactly what you mean by that "just", or indeed with the entire sentence for that matter... there are three different things which "matter" here: 1. what the chunk of text _is_, ideally and structurally. 2. the _.html_mark-up_ we apply to the chunk of text. 3. how the chunk of text will appear to the end-user. it helps to be exact in your thinking, and communication, on which of these 3 things you have under consideration.

The Kindle and Nook indent the first line of every paragraph by default, so we're good.

we try not to depend on "defaults", since they can change.

a lot of words with backslashes in the middle of them. I'm guessing the backslashes represent soft hyphens.

you're "guessing"? seriously? don't "guess". _sleuth_. and once you look at the .zml file, it should be obvious. what you need to do a lot -- reverse-engineer the .zml, so you will gain a deeper understanding of the format -- is view the .zml input file in one browser-window and the .html output file in another, in a side-by-side comparison. (i'll have more on that particular pedagogical method later.)

In the family trees the names of women are italicized. I've marked them up that way but your HTML does not italicize them.

i can't remember if i did the italics conversion in this file. maybe not, since it is unnecessary in this work-product...

When you remove the underscores the alignment of the trees will be thrown out of whack too.

the "alignment" you were looking at was purely temporary, framed for the particular purpose of this _work-product_... you need to burn that into your brain, james, right away, because i am _already_ tired and bored with repeating it.

Maybe we need a special rule that when underscores occur in a <pre> section they are replaced with spaces rather than removed.

please do not be under the impression that we are only now just making up "the rules". most of 'em have been very firm for _many_years_ now, and the ones which are still "flexible" are in that state because it's better if i can _bend_ 'em a bit... from the perspective of .zml, there is nothing difficult about your book. _nothing_. so just sit back and relax, james, and answer the exact questions that i ask, and leave it at that. ok?

I'm still kind of puzzled about how we're going to deal with page breaks (and numbers) in the final output.

well, there will be many forms of "final output", some of which honor those pagebreaks -- and thus treat them appropriately... but for something like the kindle version, they'll be eliminated. i explained the precise rules for their deletion to john redmond a while back. you didn't respond to my suggestion that we do a friendly python coding competition, for the greater e-book good. but if you wanted, you could write a script based on those rules...

list of words and names have no accents or diacritical marks, and so does the HTML. Even with global search and replace that's not going to be fun to put back.

temporary! work-product! answer the specific questions only! temporary! temporary! temporary! work-product! temporary! so sick and tired of repeating this! aaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh! aaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh and aaaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh! -bowerbird